The Communists used to have a slogan, “Art is a weapon.”
The CIA realized the truth, and that the Americans could play the game as well or better than the Communists.
The Soviet version of reality could easily be challenged by books that told the truth about what life in the West was like, as well as by books that exposed the fundamental rottenness that was the core of the Soviet system.
To the Soviet rulers, as the authors write, Pasternak’s novel was “its overt religiosity, its sprawling indifference to the demands of socialist realism and the obligation to genuflect before the October Revolution” made it dangerous reading.
